23

  Luck?

  Luck, please stop.

  My vision swam. I could feel my arms moving, over and over again. Clutching something. Plunging down. Rising, only to punch down again, each impact punctuated by a raw grunt of effort. A slick, sucking sound.

  Please stop, Luck. He’s dead.

  Sage. Her voice was filled with concern. I let my hand fall away from the dagger, leaving it buried in the dead man’s chest. I vaguely registered my second dagger, punched hilt-deep into his eye. He looked surprised. I had stabbed him so, so many times. Tears burned hot and spilled down my face as I remembered why. Somewhere, far away, I was standing up and tearing crossbow bolts from my body. I teetered, then I was stumbling towards the clearing that was ringed in flaming torches. I broke through the trees and into the open space. The goblins were gone, but what they had left in their wake tore me open and brought me to my knees.

  Luck…

  I will not describe what I saw that night. I will never speak it aloud. I will only say that it broke me. Then, it broke me again. And again.

  They don’t tell you that. You can break more than once. You can break a million times. The question is what’s there when you put the pieces back together.

  ***

  I don’t know how long I was there alone, kneeling in the blood-stained clearing that had become a grisly ritual site, but the night had passed and the sun was edging over the trees when I felt a small hand on my shoulder. Voices were murmuring distantly. Someone far away was sobbing. Sage had tried to speak with me throughout the night, but I’d been inconsolable. She was quiet now.

  “Luck…” It was Quicklily. Her voice was soft and low, and uncharacteristically gentle. “Come on, lad. Up now.”

  “Lily…?” I said, my voice cracking. I stared at her, haunted. She looked back at me, and I could tell she understood already. I said it anyway. I had to say it. “I tried. I tried so god-damned hard. I could hear everything. I heard fucking all of it.They were in so much pain.” I looked into her eyes, pleading for some answer to this, some reason that could possibly justify it. “She was so afraid, so fucking afraid. They killed a little girl. A little girl, Lily. He stood on my chest and made me listen. I couldn’t do anything. Not a god-damned thing. I was too fucking weak.”

  She looked at me, and the normally stony faced woman’s features were now etched with compassion. Kneeling there as I was, we were of a height, and the gnome gently embraced me, and I wept.

  “We can’t save them all, lad,” she said with quiet sorrow. “We try to stand between death and the innocent, but we can’t win every fight. Death is bigger than we’ll ever be. What you can do now is grieve for her. That’s the answer. It’s an awful, awful thing, and it’ll never be right, or even okay. We don’t forget things like this, we learn to live with them.” She pulled back and her green eyes met mine. They became hard, and she squeezed my shoulder. “You answered their deaths. No one will forget that.”

  For how long, I don’t know, but she sat with me and let me talk in circles, lashing myself relentlessly for my failure, breaking down repeatedly, starting the whole rant over again until I exhausted myself and was unable to weep further. Townsfolk came to take the bodies away, and I tried not to look. She just listened, and she was like a stone that grounded me; around which I could orbit, a place to anchor myself in the tide of sorrow. This was the woman who had lost friends to the dungeon. She had known this pain before, and she knew that I needed to find some release for the anguish, somewhere to put the intense feelings. I wavered from utter defeat to something else. Something that began as I rambled, a forced transmutation from grief to a tiny spark that lit the hollow space we call loss. The grief would be with me for years, I knew. Probably forever. She was just a little girl.

  What if it had been Abi? I nearly broke again at the thought, and I tried, and failed, to push it away. It felt so selfish, almost a betrayal, to be thinking about myself and my loved ones in the face of what had been done. But I couldn’t help it. A parent's absolute greatest fear is the death of their child. This death had been so, so bad. I felt relief, that it wasn’t my little girl. And I hated myself for feeling that. I’m so sorry, Adeline, I thought, and I wondered if her parents had called her Addy. My mind needed somewhere to go, some space to inhabit where I could focus through the grief and find a purpose amidst the loss.

  That place was vengeance. What other answer was there? It was not healthy. It was not safe. It was what I wanted.

  I studied Lily’s eyes for a moment. I felt empty. Somewhere in the hollow space that had become my insides, a tiny flame began to burn. “He was a player. Like me. In this game.”

  “I saw. But not like you, Luck.”

  “He knew about the mask, Lily. The only way that’s possible is if someone told him. Someone sent him. We both know who,” I said, my voice low and hard. “They did this.” My gaze was steady and cold as I met her green eyes. They seemed sad. “I am only one man, but I swear to fucking god. I can’t reach gods, but I can reach their toys; the ones like him. I can make them watch while I break every last motherfucking one of them.”

  Lily watched me for a long moment, then she slowly nodded.

  I wanted to rant at the sky. I wanted to level threats and rail against the horrific injustice of it all, but I didn’t. I didn’t need a proclamation. I needed a body count. That was the language these people were speaking, and they’d just forced me to learn it.

  I looked up, and I was calm and quiet as stone. I didn’t say anything. I just watched the sky, and my eyes were a promise. They weren’t going to get a warning. They were going to get a war.

  …and you will know me by the trail of dead.

  I looted every last thing from the corpse of the Gaian professional who’d come to kill me. I was staring down at what I’d done to the man as I heard Lily’s approach from behind.

  “Luck?”she said, gently squeezing my wrist. “Let’s go home.”

  ***

  I was hunched over a table in the Fleet Fox, trying to find something else I could possibly think about. Nothing was working. Of course it wasn’t. I had finished a third of a bottle of red Ancadian whiskey when I finally noticed the quest timer. I felt blood drain from my face. Holy shit. Holy fucking shit. It read 12 hours, 22 minutes, 48 seconds. How? Why? I began panic-swiping through notifications that had piled up last night. I swept away notification after notification, achievement after achievement, barely registering them as I searched. I found it. It came last night.

  Notification: A nearby player has met requirements that have altered the conditions of your quest. The quest timer has been adjusted accordingly.

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  That fucking asshole. That psycho fuck. The goblins had been after the hearts. He’d been helping them. They’d cut them from the Atward family before I’d killed him. Their sacrifice had completed only minutes before I put a knife in that sick fuck’s eye, and somehow the ritual had accelerated the timer. Shit. God-damnit. Hobgoblins.

  The quest had said goblins could transform into hobgoblins if their god favoured them after they harvested a fresh heart. Was the transformation instantaneous? Just how different were these things from their mundane counterparts? Too many god-damned questions were piling up. Panic punched through my semi-drunken haze and pierced clean through my grief. I saw the aftermath of what those goblins had done. It went so far beyond anything that could ever be considered a game.They were absolutely unapologetic killers.They fucking ate people. This was so, so bad.

  “LILY!!” I yelled as I threw myself up from my chair.

  ***

  Congratulations, you’ve reached level 5!

  You are eligible for class specialisation.

  Congratulations, you’ve reached level 6!

  Congratulations, you’ve reached level 7!

  Congratulations, you’ve reached level 8!

  You have stat points to distribute.

  “Woah, god damn. You know, you could get away with just congratulating me once,” I said as I was quickly moving through my notifications. I was trying to pull myself into something, anything, to alleviate the thoughts and haunting visions of what I’d seen the night before. I hadn’t slept. I felt raw, disillusioned, still broken. Never in my life had I experienced anything even remotely as fucking traumatising as listening to a family die while I was absolutely powerless to intervene.

  I had failed, and the price was so god-damned high. How many times could I pay this price? Even once was too much to bear. I’d have to rely on the few pieces of myself I’d managed to scrape back together in this short time. They’d have to be enough. I tried to focus on my progress.

  The level gains were critically important, but I had neither the time nor the inclination to celebrate. Chaos surged around me. Everywhere, people were coming and going, scattering to prepare for the impending attack. Supplies were moving from the tavern, from homes, from shops, and gathered into the three cellars that would house the folk who needed shelter from the fighting. Willy was knocking together as many spears as she could conceivably make in such a short time, and men, women, and gnomes rushed materials to the walls and gates. Tally and Squish were directing folk in making fallback positions, leveraging the houses on either side of the streets to funnel the goblins into what would ideally become killzones. To their credit, the townsfolk were not in a panic. Not like I’d been when I’d scrambled to yell my horror at Lily and Gerard.

  I’d just stepped aside to quickly tend to my notifications, but now I’d come to achievements. I sighed. I wasn’t in the mood for Meta-Me. I pulled up the first:

  Achievement Unlocked: Righteous Fury

  We all know why you’re getting this one.

  I’ve always believed there should be a special, particularly horrific and indescribably terrifying place in the universe reserved for the punishment of those who bring harm to children.

  If such a place does not exist, we should make one. Right. Fucking. Here.

  Congratulations, you’ve received a Legendary chest.

  Achievement Unlocked: Let’s Just Call it a Consensus

  You know those asshole dictators who pretend to hold elections every so often? They’ve got all this oil, or cobalt, or diamonds or some shit, and they’re always trying to legitimise their blatant robbery of their own people’s resources through hollow, self-aggrandizing gestures. How do they achieve this legitimization? Democracy! That’s right, they hold free and fair elections, bless their tyrannical little hearts. Naturally, they win these elections by stunning landslides, because they enjoy the unwavering and permanent support of the unrepressed masses who are definitely NOT trying to avoid being disappeared by the Secret Police.

  Precisely no one out there in the wider world is buying this scam, but realpolitik being what it is, the worst this guy is going to get is a sternly worded letter or some impotent, negligible sanctions, so off he goes into his 14th term as the President of the Democratic Republic of Fuck You.

  Just like this asshole dictator, you received an achievement that reached a majority vote exceeding 90% of eligible voters. Seriously? How much did this cost you in bribes?

  Congratulations, you’ve received an epic chest!

  I stared at the two achievements. I was surprised. I had underestimated the viewers. They had voted, overwhelmingly, to reward me for killing the professional. For avenging the death of a child. Meta-Me seemed both grimly satisfied and abrasive as he read out the achievements. The dictator rant sounded like something I’d say, but it felt hollow instead of biting. What had happened was so tremendously personal that some abstract diatribe about realpolitik was a thousand kilometres off the mark. It just made me fucking sad. It felt like everything everywhere should be a testament to the injustice of that girl’s suffering.

  I was instantly torn by the rewards. Whatever they were, they were going to help me going forward, but I was being rewarded in a fucking game where children dying was an acceptable part of the program. A source of drama. I ran my fingers through my hair, self soothing. These achievements were soaked in blood. Innocent blood. I fucking hate this game, I thought as I stared at the words. Had the audience voted for this because of a sense of justice, or was this just another spectacle?

  This was impossible to parse. The pain of the death of Adeline and her parents was very, very acute. I was trying to hold back the tide of grief while simultaneously charging through this crisis. All I could do was plunge forward, and try to make the goblins pay for what they’d done, and for what they would do, given the chance. I had no doubt the entire town would be either devoured or ripped open for their hearts should we fail. The goblins had no reason to leave anyone alive. Unless they needed slaves. My jaw set and my teeth clenched as I considered this. We weren’t going to let any of this happen.

  I knew what I needed from that legendary chest more than anything else. The price for this item was the death of four people, only one of whom deserved their fate. He deserved his fate a thousand times over. If I was going to reap bloody profit from these awful deaths, then I hope the audience and I were thinking along the same lines. Give me the tools to rip them all to shreds, I thought. I will spite these repulsive gods by robbing them of all their toys. The audience would provide the tools, regardless of their motivations, but I wasn’t going to do this for them. I won’t do it for you, I won’t do it for your satisfaction or your entertainment. I’ll do it for her. I let the other achievements materialise.

  Achievement Unlocked: Not Today

  You entered into one-on-one combat with another player of a higher level, and won. This time. Dude, if you keep trying this you’re going to die. Mark my god-damned words. You can only Batshit Crazy yourself out of certain death so many times. We’re counting.

  Congratulations, you’ve received an epic chest!

  Achievement Unlocked: But It Will Never Wash Away

  You killed another player. At least this one deserved it.

  Us: 1 Them: 0

  Congratulations, you’ve received an epic chest!

  I let the notifications fall away and sighed as I tried to centre myself amidst the chaos. Stat points. I was relieved to quickly find a focus and I reviewed my stats and began distributing the 12 points I had accumulated from my rapid level gains. With my added points, my consolidated stats were:

  Str: 15

  Dex: 28

  Con: 24

  Int: 15

  Cha: 22

  My emergent statistics had been increasing in fits and starts as the days had passed, but they’d made a big jump as a result of the fight with Darrion.

  Cunning: 12

  Wisdom: 7

  Luck: 13

  I’d put three points each into strength and intelligence. I needed to pad my lower stats. While dexterity accounted for most of my skill set, strength would add damage to my melee strikes, and being generally stronger was its own benefit. I placed three points into intelligence in order to increase my duration timer on the effects of consumable items, like the Shadowblast ninja bombs I’d received. The ones that had saved my life last night. Sage's idea to defeat Darrion had hinged on something I'd failed to account for. It was possible to activate stealth inside the shadowblast, and every time stealth was active, so was cunning strike. Every hit I'd scored against the Gaian had received the 50% damage increase.

  The duration of the item increased for every point of intelligence over ten, and Sage told me that was consistent with most items of that nature. Two more points went into dexterity, to keep my rogue stats growing, and finally four more points went into charisma, once again to hone my spellcasting abilities. I hadn’t expanded them as much as I would have liked, but I had every intention of doing so.

  Now it was time for something I’d been anticipating since I’d become a rogue: class specialisation. I found Gerard and explained that I’d be gone for some time, but it would be worth it. He studied me as though evaluating my mental state, and seemed slightly relieved to see me moving with purpose.

  He seemed to have an intuitive understanding of what I was going to do, and nodded his agreement. “We’re going to need every advantage we can get. Choose well.” As I turned to leave, he added, “When you get back, come and see me. I’ve got an idea.” I raised a brow.

  “What’s the plan?”

  He sighed softly. “You’ll see. After what I did while you were gone, this next part might be a tipping point for the townsfolk. Let’s just hope it doesn’t get us hanged.”

  “Dude, I narrowly escaped a hanging yesterday.”

  “Let’s hope your luck holds,” he said with a smirk.

  “God-damnit, Gerard.”